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APPENDIX
#7 —
“We Learn to Live a Christian Life as our Vocation”
There once was a
steadily growing Lutheran congregation in a mid-western city whose
population included a lot of well educated people.
One of its members was laughingly referred to as “Old
Faithful.” He volunteered for everything.
Much to the consternation of the choir director, he volunteered for
the choir, even though he didn’t sing very well. Naturally, he also
volunteered for the evangelism committee.
He was there every night when they went out to make calls.
There was one problem: Old Faithful was not too well educated and
his grammar left much to be desired.
So the pastor carefully screened the cards of prospective members
on which he asked this man to call, usually pairing him with a person
having better grammar. One January night the
temperature was -19 degrees. Not
many members of the evangelism committee turned out that night.
But Old Faithful was there, and there were more than enough cards
to go around. “Pastor, since there
aren’t many of us here tonight,” he said, “let me take an extra pack
of cards and I’ll just call on those people.”
With that he scooped up some cards that the pastor had not had a
chance to screen. That night
a number of PhD’s called on by Old Faithful decided to join the
congregation. Later one of them told
the pastor: “We were really intrigued by the man who called on us.
It was obvious to us that he wasn’t ‘one of our kind.’
But he simply told us in a rather moving way what the church meant
to him. We decided that his coming said something about you and the
church. You must be quite
insightful to know how to work a person like that into your program, and
we’d like to be members of a congregation with a spirit like that.” The pastor could only
shake his head at the irony. |